Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.
“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.The Intermingling of Dual Vocations
Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.
A Frustration That Cut Deep
During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”
The Artistic Performance of Cutting
By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.
“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked
Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”
Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes
The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.
“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.
Embracing Ephemeral Elements
During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.
A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”
A Practitioner of Secrecy
“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.
Confronting the Violence of War
Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|
